


Six Paradoxes of Azabeth Siege

by Anonymous



Category: Josh Kirby...Time Warrior!
Genre: 5+1 Things, Ancestor Worship, Azabeth Sure Is Fucked Up, Backstory, Child Abuse, Dehumanization, F/M, JK/Azabeth is not a healthy relationship destined to last, One Shot, Slavery, Time Travel, Trauma, ambiguous offscreen genocide, forced to fight as gladiators, not au despite the five things not having happened, not so ambiguous onscreen genocide, seriously does time travel count as genocide, time travel is a trip and a half, what is the tense for would have been going to happen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-03
Updated: 2017-11-03
Packaged: 2019-01-28 20:46:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12615148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Five and a half things that never happened to Azabeth Siege (plus one that did).





	Six Paradoxes of Azabeth Siege

_One_

Azabeth learns callousness as a child. There’s no pinpointing the exact moment; it is an open question whether one such as her has the time to gain innocence before losing it. Nonetheless, one memory stands out as particularly illustrative. It is this.

The human, reeking of oniony human underarm sweat and recent contact with steel, leans in close to Azabeth’s mother to whisper something. He glances at Azabeth and smiles. Azabeth is about four or five now and she knows enough to be wary of his smirk.

Mother relaxes and goes to lie down on the straw pallet in the corner of the cell she shares with her two children. Her eyes are dull and she gazes far away, as though she can see through solid metal. The human mounts her. Azabeth watches, not understanding what she sees. To her, it seems gentler than some of the other things the humans do to them. It isn’t until much later that she understands that this is why the blood of her people is so dilute, why they no longer look like their ancestors once did.

Afterward, when the human has gone, Mother curses Azabeth for being cute and untrustworthy, curses herself for loving her child more than her honor, prays to her ancestors to grant her numbness and release, smacks Azabeth full on the face, and weeps.

Azabeth does not weep.

She does, however, learn something about love.

 

_Two_

Azabeth learns gentleness in the arena. It is not weakness; it is controlled strength, much harder than using her full strength at all times.

Gladiatorial weapons are symmetrical. The first time Azabeth is given a set of real, edged weapons and sent to fight, at the age of nine, she doesn’t understand. Every edge of the jagged blades is sharp and there are no easy handholds. She later learns that this is to amuse the humans. To tighten her fists in rage only gives them what they want. She learns to be gentle, not in spite of cruelty, but because of it.

At the age of twelve, Azabeth celebrates a full year since the last time she left the arena with bleeding palms.

 

_Three_

Azabeth takes pride in slavery. Or to be precise, in her history with it. At thirteen, she is free, and she is confused, and she is lost, and her mother is dead. The rebel base takes her in and soon she starts training in swordsmanship and learning tactics and logistics and reading commentary on the Codes of Kang. She is almost one of them, these free people.

Some of them came from other raids on the slavers, but not many. More were born as free as any of her race. (No soul can live in freedom so long as another remains enslaved. And yet, there is a difference between unfreedom in a cell, and unfreedom in a rebel base.) And although they share and pray to the same ancestors, although they are all one in purpose, although they all follow the Codes of Kang, they are deeply divided by their unshared experiences and greatly differing skills. Before they know her, before she is one of them, Azabeth needs something to keep them from pitying her or looking down on her for the poverty of her education and her lack of civilized manners.

There are few among the rebels who know how to wield gladiatorial blades, fewer who know how to wield them safely, and no others who can bring themselves to do so. And so when they see her turn the very symbols of human cruelty back against them, when they see her strike and see her undamaged hands, that serves her purposes admirably. Azabeth becomes a legend before she becomes a person.

 

_Four_

Azabeth learns connection from an alien time traveler while they both are adrift in time and space, away from all they know.

Her heart will not stop pounding. She can smell blood. There is no blood. She can smell it. Not human blood, either, but the blood of her own people, going rancid in the dirt. She is among humans. She is the only one of her kind, among many armed humans. She does not panic, but a part of her rebels and refuses to go numb and bear it. Not anymore. Not now that she has tasted better. She will hate it. She will grieve like one who has some right to grieve, like one who has lost something. No one grieves for what was never theirs.

She sweeps her hair aside. Her people have told her to be proud of the elegant marks of her illustrious ancestry, but all she can remember right now is the humans speaking, not to her, but of her, of “it” and “its” filthy, slimy gray protrusions. There is a reason she wears her hair long and flowing over her gray-ridged ears, never tying it back.

Josh Kirby does not seem to react at all. He does not show disgust or respect. Instead, he speaks to her of something called high school in ways that mean nothing to her; she has too little context to understand the content of his words.

But she understands his meaning nonetheless. It never crossed his mind that there were any meaningful differences between them, from ancestry or upbringing. To him, she is mostly human, which is all that matters to him. They have both had unpleasant experiences in their lives, which makes them the same.

This is not likely to be true. She is not human. Perhaps high school is like slavery; she does not know.

What she knows, Azabeth who was a slaver’s child, Azabeth who was a slave, Azabeth who was a refugee with manners alien to the rebels who saved her, Azabeth who was a legend, is that for the first time, someone looks at her and sees someone like himself.

Azabeth is someone’s friend.

 

_Five_

Azabeth learns the truth from a lie.

She learned long ago—not in absolute terms, the number of days elapsed for them in the time pod, but somehow subjectively a very long time—that she who follows the Codes of Kang is the only one in their company keeping track of who has saved whom how many times.

Josh Kirby saved her from execution. This is true.

She learned belatedly that he would not have died had she not caught him before he fell into the timestream; he did fall afterward, and he survived. However, she is reasonably certain that his time warrior powers would not be able to protect him from Dreadnought or from the worms.

And yet Azabeth finds herself saying that she must stay with Josh Kirby until her life debt is repaid. The life debt which she just repaid, freeing his foot from the door. He would have been carried, outside the shuttle, through the vacuum of space, into even greater peril. It is just conceivable that he might have survived, as it is just conceivable that the executioner’s axe might have missed her neck without his help.

He did slow the plane as they escaped the giant, but she very well might have made it without him; he didn’t have much effect and the plane moved slowly and haltingly even before he touched it. In fact, it might have been easier, had the rope not had to bear his weight first. And yes, he saved her from the swordsman in the giant’s arena, but she saved him there, too. She gave the giant a good show, very needlessly flashy and relatively nonlethal, distracting it from Josh Kirby and Irwin 1138’s abysmally unimpressive mock-fight. The giant’s punishment could easily have proven lethal had it paid enough attention to them to be displeased; it was sheer luck that the man they saw subjected to it survived.

She is not in Josh Kirby’s debt. She might still have been before the shuttle, but not now.

Instead, she realizes when she hears herself lie, she needs some reason to continue to stay by his side, codes or no codes, whether he wants her there or not.

 

_Plus one_

Azabeth learns hope through dying. When she knows what her final duty is, when she has said her last goodbye—in her heart, though never with her voice—to the people who were her duty for so long, she thinks about what she wishes she could have had, about what she wishes she could have in her remaining time, no matter how short.

Already, the timeline has been mended. “Mended” so that her people never were. Will never be. Will there be an Azabeth in the new present? What will she be like? Or will there be no Azabeth Siege at all? With all the changes to the timeline, it seems unlikely that one person will live and be about the same in both presents, derived from both histories. She knows too well, has too vivid memories, of how her people came to be half-human as they are. That will not happen. Why should the children of such unions live, when the unions themselves will not happen?

Her actions are already undone. Her present is now the future, from her current standpoint, and will never happen. She will not be born in captivity or train in the arena or anything of the sort. She will strike no decisive blows for the resistance, which will never exist and never be needed.

Her actions in the past have already never happened. She has already never fought a dragon. The eggs have already never been cast adrift, there are no worms, and thus, she never fought them, nor ever will.

Azabeth Siege is not real. As soon as she takes her CDL off, the universe will remember that.

However much time she has left will never have affected anyone else. And Azabeth wants to spend it with Josh.

She hands over her bracelet, saying a silent prayer to an ancestor she knows nothing about, and leans in to spend her last moments—

—Elizabeth knows more of pain and fear than most her age, and there is no reason for it. She can recall nothing terrifying ever happening to her. Her parents are wonderful, and yet she tenses, expecting a blow, every time her mother reaches for her.

She has the inexplicable sense that perhaps, in some way, she is an angel who once answered a devout prayer. She has the vague sense that there is a grand and unifying reason for her life, that she chose it while yet unborn. She feels, at odd moments, like a gracious hostess, like someone is spying on her, like she has done something great and beneficent.

She feels like a changeling child, intruding on her family’s life. She feels like an alien in human skin and a guest in her own body, there only on the sufferance of its true owner. She isn’t normal, at all, from her strange reaction to touch, to her flair for overly formal speech, to the formless nightmares from which she wakes quietly in a cold sweat, to her desperate homesickness for nowhere in particular.

Sometimes she feels as though she harbors a demon, or is possessed. Sometimes she feels as though she is one.

And yet.

From the day she meets Josh Kirby and falls in love at first sight, she’s happy.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally this was going to be Seven Paradoxes of Azabeth Siege, five things plus two (the actual plus one and a bittersweet answer to the question of what the original un-time-travel-altered version of her planet was like), but the extra bit didn't fit very well and it was hard to make it clear what it was and it weakened the ending to have an answer to that.
> 
> I think it's not really that weird that she has an ancestor with similar looks who was contemporary with Josh Kirby that she could...move in with...since she has any human ancestors at all she must have a lot of them more than a hundred years before she was born.


End file.
